Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food: Who Should We Blame For Our Country's Unhealthiness: Food Companies, the Government, Nutritionists, or Ourselves?

Lately I have been reading In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan. Unlike his other book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, this book focuses on how Americans have adopted their diet and how it is strongly influenced by the uprise of nutritionism and food science. I have currently only read the first part of the book, but I couldn't help myself but to talk about the surprising information I learned about.

So...my opinion on the current obesity and unhealthiness issues of Americans has always been to blame the Junk Food Companies and Processed Food Producers for pressuring people into buying their products. Of course, media also contributed. Without the endless Pepsi ads, the fun cereal commercials, the colorful food packages of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, as well as headlining all the new health claims and fad diets, American's probably would not be eating as unhealthy as they are. But what made it okay for companies to do this to our health? Why would the government ever allow such things to happen?

In his book, Michael goes through the history of nutritionism and pigpoints the event that changed how we viewed our diets. It started with the father of nutrition, Justus von Liebig. He was a German scientist who came up with the theory that the human metabolism only needs three elements to function properly: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. He got this idea by determining that these three elements were all that was required for nurturing plant soil. With this theory he developed a new type of baby formula that consisted of only cow's milk, wheat flour, malted flour, and potassium bicarbonate. However, babies that drank this formula seemed to be in ill-health. From this observation, Liebig noticed that they were missing other nutrients in their diets, which lead him to the discovery of vitamins in 1912. This is when nutritional science began.

After this, nutritionist began to think that getting the necessary vitamins (along with the macronutritents protein, fats, and carbs which was discovered shortly after) was the only thing our bodies needed to stay healthy. Instead of thinking like "Which foods should we ate to stay healthy?" it was more like "Which nutrients do we need to stay healthy?" And more scientists began researching the effects of different nutrients on human health.

Where this might sound like a great discovery in science, it all went haywire in the year of 1977. But before I explain that year, let me give some background to how we got to the grand finale. In 1968, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs was created in order to discuss to rapid increases in Western diseases. Before and during that time, research was being done on the effects of fat and dietary cholesterol consumption on heart disease (mostly found in red meat and dairy products). This is when the "lipid hypothesis" came to be, that is, that a high consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol increased the likelihood of developing cardiovascular disease. In January 1977, the SSCNHN committee issued a new set of dietary guidelines that suggested Americans to cut down on their consumptions of red meat and dairy products. However, when this was announced to the public, the red meat and dairy industries got infuriated! How could the government tell the public (their consumers) not to buy their products anymore?! When they protested to the committee, Senator George McGovern, decided to change the wording of the guidelines from "reduce consumption of meat" to "choose meats, poultry, and fish that will reduce saturated fat intake." Notice how wording is everything. So now, people were continuing to eat meat but just choose the ones they thought were "healthier". And it didn't stop there, in the 1980s, the meat industry forced the Senator out of office at the next elections, sending out a warning signal to not mess with them and their businesses. Since then, the rules of the dietary guidelines have been changed so that no wholes food are allowed to be stated. Instead, it must only consist of nutrients.

Well, even before this happened, food producers were adding nutrients to their foods to make them more appealing to the public. With every new health claim (low-fat, low-carb, omega-3, you name it), the producers were changing their products to satisfy these claims. In 1938, a Food, Drug, Cosmetic Act was imposed that required all products that were not of real food to have the label "imatition" on the packaging in order to allow consumers to know what they were buying. You can imagine how much the processed food companies felt about this act. They didn't want to tell their consumers that their product was not real! Why would someone buy a food box with the words "imitation" on it? In 1973, the FDA got rid of this rule and replaced it with the rule that imitation food that was not "nutritionally inferior" than the real food does not need to have the ugly "imitation" label on it's packaging. After this, processed foods had a field day with all the new stuff they were adding to their foods. That is why we see so many foods that claim to have different health effects.

And if you are a consumer, how would you know the difference between the real food and the newly enhanced foods that claim to be the same in health? You can see how this got out of hand. Now people were buying food that was supposedly healthy, which in fact, were not. I mean, how healthy can low-fat cookies really be? But now people have the incentive to eat more of theses foods. And with the 1977 health claims, people started substituting fats with carbohydrates. This is what lead to the obesity issues in America;; we got confused on which foods were healthy and which were not.

At this point, it seems like the government is to blame....Well, they somewhat are. But, this isn't the worst part...

What if I told you that all the hype about the consumption of saturated fats and cholesterol and heat disease was all BOGUS! Well, it is. It just so happens that nutritions have seen that there is no connect between the two. And to make it worse, some of the foods that the nutritionist back in the 1970's were telling people to consume, like margarine, was actually increasing the risk of heart disease!!!! Isn't that terrible! In fact, the 1977 health claims were only based off of a few studies and observations of the increase foods in people's diets at the time. So, if nutritionists never publicized these so-called "health discoveries", would Americans be in the same boat as they are today? I'll let you decide....